STEAM UPDATE 2: Okay, we figured this out. Apparently there's was an auth server issue before confusing things. You can buy from Steam, but read below.

Those installing from a Steam download: your CD key is in a text file installed with the game. Look at:

C:\Program Files\Steam\steamapps\common\prey\base\preykey

Copy this file to $HOME/.prey/base/preykey ...

If the game prompts you for a CD key when you first start it, you did it wrong. The preykey file is two characters less than you'll get from a physical CD key.

Also, if you're on Win64, "Program Files" will be "Program Files (x86)".

I am updating the installer to handle copying preykey for you.

I have not tried the direct2drive version; someone tell me if it works.

If the game crashes on startup, and had written this to the terminal...

GL_VENDOR: NVIDIA Corporation GL_VERSION: 1.4 (2.1.2 NVIDIA 177.82)

...then your drivers are misinstalled. The red flag there is the "1.4" string. The current nvidia drivers should look like this...

GL_VENDOR: NVIDIA Corporation GL_VERSION: 2.1.2 NVIDIA 177.82

...almost universally, the problem is multiple OpenGL libraries residing on the system, and usually it's because you installed the closed-source Nvidia drivers from a distro-provided package. My current guess is that the X server package is installing a generic, Mesa-based GL, and the Nvidia package installs another.

In all cases, it appears that installing the drivers from nvidia.com--using their installer--fixes it, probably because part of the installation process is cleaning out old and incorrect libGL.so's that might be laying around your filesystem. The downside is that your distro will no longer be able to automatically maintain the package for you...but you're still using the same binary-only driver at the end of the day, either way.

Some people have mentioned that the problem went away when updating the distro-provided package, for various distros. I haven't done much research into the specific causes and solutions; this is all anecdotal guesswork.

As for Intel GPU users, it looks like the video drivers are just wanged for your hardware at the moment. Sorry, the game just isn't working at all from what I've heard. I'm not certain this game is going to be playable on GMA* chipsets anyhow, but you should probably talk to the x.org developers about it if you want to dig deeper.

To uninstall, run "uninstall-prey.sh" in the game's installation directory. This will remove application menus, etc.

If distros want to repackage this, I don't care. I only ship the MojoSetup installer so it works everywhere, but I think it's great that distros can compete for the best user experience by making installation uniform. The installer can be fully automated from the command line (email me for specifics!), and failing that, it is a self-extracting .zip file, if that's easier than running it. If you repackage it, please make the user agree to the EULAs (the game's and PunkBuster's!)...we have both EULAs translated into four languages.